So I have been playing a bit of this new game, Civony, over the past few games. Civony is a browser-based nation simulation, but instead of limiting the number of things you do a day, encourages you to play it for a minute or so every 15 minutes, and encourages you to spend about an hour or so a day doing dedicated gaming. I've played a number of these games before, all the way back to Earth 2050 in my high school days, but I found this game in particular interesting because you are constantly doing things, and receive continual feedback from the game.
The beginning of the game is also fairly beginner-friendly thanks to a series of quests at the beginning of the game that allow you to chain up development until you are about ready to go conquer a neighboring plot of land. This is markedly different from other games in the genre, which generally require you to figure the system out before you can actually be a productive member of society. In most other games of this sort, half of the reason to join an alliance is so that you can figure out how to keep even a basic country afloat.
At the same time, this game is fairly complex, and extremely time demanding. I apparently joined this game on opening day, and got into a very good alliance (I totally lucked out, we just happened to get pretty good recruits). In the process of trying to understand the game's economy, I got my civilization (is that what you call it) into the top 100 for about a day.
However, the novelty of the game has begun to wear off as I realize just how much of a time commitment this game requires. Generally speaking, in order to act relatively efficiently, you need to log in two or three times a day and spend a good deal of time doing actions. However, you are never actually "playing" in the traditional sense. Instead, you are simply queuing things to build and research in each of your cities, allowing each action to work until completion, at which point you take a new action.
The game's economic model also seems to need work. Because of the way that beginner quests reward players for completing objectives, some resources were much scarcer than they should have been on opening day, while others were far too plentiful. This likely has to do with the intended long term balance of the game, in which technology factors largely into success, but at this time, causes players to be frustrated with the game, as everyone seems to be always trying to trade their items for gold.
Still, the game appears to be phenomenally successful thusfar. According to people I spoke with in-game, Civony's first server went live only a week before the second server, and the second server had only been up for a little over a day before Civony launched a third. It will be interesting to see how much revenue can be driven off the game, but it certainly has an incredibly strong userbase for this point in it's life cycle.
As for me, my time with Civony has probably come to a close. Although I found its economic model to be interesting, and I liked that it rewarded active participation on my part, it is consuming too much of my time for something that I am not finding to be rewarding. You can certainly accuse me of not giving the game a fair shake (the 7-day beginner's protection period has almost expired), but the other cities in my immediate area's power pales in comparison to my own (many of them have never even played, it appears), and I have no doubt that steamrolling them would simply require me to exert the effort.
I encourage all of you to check this out (unlike most of the free online games I have tried, this game was actually something I could see myself playing over the long haul if I wasn't constantly trying to find new games). I could certainly see many of my friends become absorbed into this game world. You can find it at http://www.civony.com/
If anyone tries it, let me know how it goes.
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